Hitachi GST launches 750GB mobile hard drive

SAN JOSE, USA: Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (GST) announced its new 375GB/platter, 5,400 RPM and 7,200 RPM, 2.5-inch hard drives — Travelstar 5K750 and Travelstar 7K750 hard drive families.

Featuring a standard 9.5mm two-disk design, the new drives come in capacities of 750GB, 640GB and 500GB.

The Travelstar 5K750 and 7K750 drive families are the first Hitachi GST hard drives that feature Advanced Format.

Advanced Format increases the physical sector size on hard drives from 512 bytes to 4096 (4K) bytes.

"From their recently announced slim, 7mm 2.5-inch drives to their broad new family of standard 9.5mm 2.5-inch hard drives, Hitachi offers a wide variety of capacities, speeds and form factors that support virtually all of our notebook computing needs,” said Wentao Yang, vice president, Global Procurement of Lenovo.

The Travelstar 5K750 family is a 5,400 RPM hard drive offered with an 8 MB buffer and a Serial ATA 3Gb/s interface for fast data transfer rates.

The Travelstar 5K750 family has been designed with low power consumption for energy efficiency, offering 0.5 watts low power idle and 1.4 watts power during read/write operations, which contributes to longer battery life in notebooks and other unplugged applications.

The new Travelstar 5K750 also offers non operating shock at 1000G/1ms to protect against bumps and rough handling in mobile environments.

The Travelstar 7K750 has a 16MB buffer, 3Gb/s SATA interface, read/write power specification at 1.8W.

Travelstar 7K750 is a self-encrypting drive (SED).

The Travelstar 5K750 retail hard drive kits will be available in November with a suggested retail price of $129.99.

The Travelstar 5K750 EA version will be shipping to OEMs for qualification by the end of the year.

The 7,200 RPM Travelstar 7K750 family, including EA versions and retail kits, will be available in Q1 2011.